The Texas abortion law's vigilante enforcement mechanism is exactly how Jim Crow worked

[Nevilledog]

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Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
Thread: Texas abortion vigilantism & Jim Crow

By now, ppl know that the TX abortion law was constructed to avoid lawsuit enforcement. But there's more to the story.

The law's tactics are the exact same that TX used a century ago under Jim Crow

The Texas abortion law’s vigilante enforcement mechanism is exactly how Jim Crow worked
Deputizing citizens to enforce legally suspect laws is how Texas suppressed black citizens’ rights to vote
flux.community
10:17 AM · Sep 14, 2021

https://flux.community/stefanie-lindquist/2021/09/texas-abortion-laws-vigilante-enforcement-mechanism-exactly-how-jim-crow

*snip*

The U.S. Justice Department filed suit against the state on the grounds the law violated a woman’s constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy before fetal viability. In its suit, the Justice Department specifically cites one of the cases that was brought over a Texas Jim Crow law that excluded Blacks from participating in primaries, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1944.

Following Reconstruction in the South, Texas banned African Americans from voting in party primaries in a law adopted in 1923. This was an example of Jim Crow, a system of laws and customs that institutionalized anti-Black discrimination in the U.S.

When this state law was challenged before the Supreme Court and struck down in Nixon v. Herndon in 1927, the Texas Legislature responded in 1928 with a tricky maneuver much like the current Texas abortion law. Texas repealed the offending statute and enacted legislation that specifically delegated to political parties the power to determine “qualifications of voters in primary elections,” thus seeking to take the state out of the equation.

By putting that power in the hands of private parties, allowing them to discriminate against and prevent African Americans from voting, the state sought to avoid legal rules, based on the Constitution, that required “state action” before a law could be struck down. Essentially, the state contracted out the dirty work of denying Black Texans the right to vote.

*snip*

[Comfortably_Numb]

1. Fascist racist Briscoe Cain even put old Jim Crow language in the early voter suppression bill.

He got called out so they changed the words, not the idea. *uck Texas.

[crickets]

2. Go, DOJ. nt